A Nineteenth-Century Bengali Housewife and Her Robinson Crusoe Days: Travel and Intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi’S the Diary of a Certain Housewife
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Feminismo/s 36, December 2020, 49-76 ISSN: 1989-9998 A NINETEENTH-CENTURY BENGALI HOUSEWIFE AND HER ROBINSON CRUSOE DAYS: TRAVEL AND INTIMACY IN KAILASHBASHINI DEBI’S THE DIARY OF A CERTAIN HOUSEWIFE UN AMA DE CASA BENGALÍ DEL SIGLO DIECINUEVE Y SUS DÍAS COMO ROBINSON CRUSOE: VIAJES E INTIMIDAD EN THE DIARY OF A CERTAIN HOUSEWIFE DE KAILASHBASHINI DEBI Swati MOITRA Author / Autora: Abstract primera Swati Moitra Gurudas College, University of Calcutta Kailashbashini Debi’s Janaika Grihabadhu’r Calcutta, India [email protected] Diary (The Diary of a Certain Housewife; writ- https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3448-4915 ten between 1847 and 1873, serialised almost a century later in the monthly Basumati in Submitted / Recibido: 02/03/2020 Accepted / Aceptado: 02/05/2020 1952) chronicles her travels along the water- ways of eastern Bengal. Her travels are firmly To cite this article / Para citar este artículo: Moitra, Swati. «A nineteenth-century bengali centred around her husband’s work; in his housewife and her Robinson Crusoe days: absence, she is Robinson Crusoe, marooned Travel and intimacy in Kailashbashini in the hinterlands of Bengal with only her Debi’s The diary of a certain housewife». In Feminismo/s, 36 (December 2020): daughter. 49-76. Monographic dossier / Dosier Bearing in mind the gendered limitations monográfico: Departures and Arrivals: Women, on travel in the nineteenth century for upper- Mobility and Travel Writing / Salidas y llegadas: mujeres, movilidad y escritura de viajes, Raquel caste Bengali women, this essay investigates García-Cuevas García y Sara Prieto García- Kailashbashini Debi’s narration of her travels Cañedo (coords.), https://doi.org/10.14198/ fem.2020.36.03 and the utopic vision of the modern housewife that Kailashbashini constructs for herself. The Licence / Licencia: essay looks into the audacious nature of Kai- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. lashbashini’s effort: to claim a space in public memory alongside her husband. In the process, the essay seeks to address the restructuring of © Swati Moitra domestic life made possible by the experience of travel, and explore the contours of women’s travel writing in nineteenth-century India. Feminismo/s 36, December 2020, 49-76 49 SWATI MOITRA A nineteenth-century bengali housewife and her Robinson Crusoe days: Travel and intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi’s The diary of a certain housewife Keywords: Nineteenth century; Women’s writing; Life writing; Travel narratives; India; Colonial Bengal. Resumen La obra Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary de Kailashbashini Debi (The Diary of a Certain Housewife, escrito entre 1847 y 1873, y publicado por entregas después de casi un siglo en la revista mensual Basumati en 1952) narra sus viajes por los canales de Bengala del este. Sus viajes se centran firmemente en el trabajo de su marido, en su ausencia, ella es un Robinson Crusoe, abandonada sola con su hija en la zona rural del país. Teniendo en cuenta las limitaciones de género que regían la actividad de viajar para las mujeres de las castas altas de Bengala en el siglo diecinueve, el presente ensayo investiga la narración de Kailashbashini Debi de sus viajes y la visión utópica de ama de casa moderna que se construyó para sí misma. Este ensayo investiga la audacia de su esfuerzo: reclamar un espacio en la memoria pública al lado de su marido. En el proceso, este ensayo busca abordar la reestructuración de la vida doméstica hecha posible por la experiencia del viaje, y además explora los contornos de la escritura de viajes por mujeres en el siglo diecinueve en la India. Palabras clave: siglo diecinueve; escritura de mujeres; (auto)biografía; narrativa de viajes; India; Bengala colonial. 1. INTRODUCTION1 Kailashbashini Debi’s Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary (The Diary of a Certain Housewife; written between 1847 and 1873, and serialized almost a century later in the Mashik Basumati magazine, in 1952) is not the first published travel narrative by a Bengali woman. Krishnabhabini Das’ England’e Bangamahila (A Bengali Woman in England, 1885) has traditionally been considered the earliest published travel narrative of this nature, although Harder’s (2020) recent work has engaged with a lesser-known history of narratives emerging 1. A version of this paper was presented at the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference, 2019, in a panel titled, ‹‹Spatial Proximities, Cultural Intimacies: Travel as Solidarity, Freedom, and Pleasure within South Asia and the Former Mughal Domains, 1700-1950››. I am thankful to my co-panelists, Mou Banerjee, Nicolas Roth, and Muhammed Ashraf Thirisseri, for the same. I am also grateful to Prof. GJV Prasad for his support and commentary on an earlier version of this paper in the course of my doctoral degree. Feminismo/s 36, December 2020, 49-76 50 SWATI MOITRA A nineteenth-century bengali housewife and her Robinson Crusoe days: Travel and intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi’s The diary of a certain housewife in the 1860s in women’s magazines of the time. It remains, however, one of the earliest texts composed by a Bengali woman in the nineteenth century. Composed over a period of three decades, Kailashbashini’s «diary»2 chronicles –along with her domestic life with her reformist husband, and her opinions of various Hindu and Brahmo practices– her travels along the waterways of eastern Bengal as she accompanied her husband on his tours to the districts. From the delight of visiting the historic site of the Battle of Plassey, to the long days spent on water playing cards with her husband, Kailashbashini’s book narrates both the excitement as well as the mundane everyday nature of travel along the waterways that crisscrossed the erstwhile province of Bengal in British India. At a time when the bhadramahila’s 3 experiences of travel were limited to chaperoned trips to temples or bathing ghats, annual trips to one’s parental home, and the occasional, more adventurous pilgrimages to Kashi or Puri, Kailashbashini’s narration of her travels stands out. It presents a portrait of conjugal intimacy as she and her husband engage in vivacious debates, argue and confide in one another, and travel constantly across the riverways of lower Bengal. Taking account of the gendered limitations on travel in the nineteenth century for the bhadramahila, this essay will inves- tigate Kailashbashini Debi’s narration of her travels, and the utopic vision of the modern housewife that Kailashbashini constructs for herself, made possible by the travel that shapes the entire text. The essay will consider the audacious nature of Kailashbashini’s enterprise –which is to claim a space for herself in public memory alongside her husband, who was a public figure of note. In the process, the essay will address the restructuring of domestic life made possible by the experience of travel, and explore the contours of women’s travel writing in nineteenth-century India. To this end, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section of the paper will delve into the complex question of travel and mobility for the 2. Kailashbashini refers to her narrative as her «book». This essay will henceforth do the same, despite the publication of the same with «diary» in its title. A later section of the essay will address the question of nomenclature in greater detail. 3. The word bhadra, meaning «polite» or «refined», has a specific caste-class-religious connotation in nineteenth-century Bengal, the prefix being primarily used to describe the English-educated Hindu (or Brahmo) upper caste who had either secured enough wealth to constitute the elite, or had secured a waged occupation sufficient to be deemed middle class. Feminismo/s 36, December 2020, 49-76 51 SWATI MOITRA A nineteenth-century bengali housewife and her Robinson Crusoe days: Travel and intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi’s The diary of a certain housewife bhadramahila in the nineteenth century, at a time when «modern» means of travel such as the railways were increasingly transforming the landscape of Bengal (and colonial India at large). The paper will then go on to engage with Bengali travel narratives in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on women’s narratives. It will argue against the scholarly tendency to cate- gorise nineteenth-century women’s consciousness of time as a non-modern consciousness, as opposed to that of their male counterparts, and make a case for different strategies of reading women’s narratives from the time. Simonti Sen (2005), in her Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870-1910, has pointed to the frustrating absence of Muslim voices in travel narratives from the period. This absence, as Mahua Sarkar has noted, needs not be treated as a benign coincidence, but as a systematic erasure of Muslim voices, especially those of women who were «written out of normative history» (227)4. This paper is no exception to this «normative» historiography, even though it makes a point to situate the bhadramahila in her caste-class-religious location. Thereafter, in the final section, the essay will engage with Kailashbashini Debi’s book, asking questions about travel, freedom, and intimacy, and Kailashbashini’s framing of herself as the protag- onist of an everyday domestic drama. 2. THE BHADRAMAHILA AS A TRAVELLER IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL To grasp the fraught question of travel and mobility for the bhadramahila in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one might turn to a set of satir- ical black-and-white pen sketches by Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938) from the early decades of the twentieth century. In one sketch (Fig. 1), two sari-clad women –their heads covered as per expectations of modesty– walk down a semi-deserted railway platform. Two men –one clad in traditional dhoti-kurta and armed with a fashionable walking stick (meant to represent a Hindu bhadralok) and another in a bandhgala jacket, sporting a beard and cap (meant to represent a Muslim gentleman)– sit on a bench on their right, 4.